Being-Time

A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's Shobogenzo Uji

Shinshu Roberts

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781614291138
• eBook ISBN:
  9781614291381
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

A tour-de-force guide to Zen Master Dogen’s most subtle and sophisticated philosophical premises: that being and time are inseparable.

“Impermanence is time itself, being itself—yet time and being are not at all as we imagine them to be. To really understand and fully embrace this point is to live in a radically different world—a world of awakening, inclusion, and love. Zen Master Dogen frames the teaching on impermanence explicitly as a teaching about time—and all of Dogen’s profoundly poetic teachings flow from his seminal understanding of time, as expressed in Uji (Being-Time), the famous—and famously difficult—essay in his masterwork, Shobogenzo. In Uji, Dogen teaches that time itself, being itself, is luminous awakening. It is all-inclusive, all-elusive, ultimately healing, and eternal.

            In this book, Shinshu Roberts does full justice, as does no other book I know of, to Dogen’s words. She offers interpretation of Uji only after careful consideration and marshaling of many sources—and offers simple everyday examples to illustrate points that seem at first abstruse. If this text causes you to doubt your most cherished concepts about your life, it will have done its work.”
—from the Foreword by Norman Fischer

Being-Time thoroughly explores Dogen’s teaching on how we practice as Buddhas by understanding the relationship between being and time as it is—and as we perceive it to be. Using Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji (The True Dharma Eye, Being-Time), Shinshu Roberts offers a twofold analysis of this teaching: the meaning of the text and practice with the text, giving examples how we apply Dogen’s complex teaching to our daily lives. 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Uji (Being-Time)
• 1. Uji Is Being-Time
• 2. Things Just as They Are
• 3. Time’s Glorious Golden Radiance
• 4. Present Doubt
• 5. Embodying the World
• 6. The One Hundred Grasses Exist
• 7. The One Hundred Grasses Are Time
• 8. Am I a Buddha or a Demon?
• 9. Time Is Multidimensional
• 10. Whose Time Is It Anyway?
• 11. What Is Today’s Time?
• 12. Learning Intimacy
• 13. The Essential Point
• 14. Time Passing
• 15. “Look! Look!”
• 16. Horses, Sheep, Rats, and Tigers
• 17. Penetrating Exhaustively
• 18. Manifesting the Tall Golden Buddha
• 19. Nothing Remains
• 20. Groping for Your Original Face
• 21. Deva Kings Presencing Here and Now
• 22. Passage of No-Passage
• 23. How Long Does Enlightenment Take?
• 24. Yaoshan Bites the Iron Bull
• 25. A Raised Eyebrow, a Blink of the Eye
• 26. The Morning Star Appears
• 27. The Mind Is a Donkey, the Word Is a Horse
• 28. Encounters
• 29. Ultimate Attainment in Being-Time
• 30. Is There Something More?
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright